Coolest Jobs in IT —

Coolest jobs in tech: decoding life, touring solar systems

When you run IT for cutting-edge scientists, no job is ordinary.

Traditional IT meets .edu

The JPL is pretty large, and its staff has the usual IT needs (along with some unusual ones).

jpl.nasa.gov

This isn't to say that all IT jobs in a research environment are distinctive—even scientists need e-mail and calendaring support. But the academic environment doesn't always work in the same way as the corporate world, where the IT staff can often dictate hardware and software.

For example, when we talked to Wolfgang von Rueden, director of IT at CERN, he mentioned that most researchers to the particle physics center bring their own laptops, so IT has to be prepared to support multiple operating systems and a dizzying variety of configurations. The laptops might go home at night, and visiting researchers often need to plug in and get to work, so there's no way of guaranteeing that an outside laptop won't transfer some malware into the local network. As a result, CERN staff have engineered their network to monitor for suspicious traffic and to isolate whatever machine generates it.

This focus on enabling flexibility and collaboration (even when it might make things harder on IT) was also apparent when we talked to JPL's Richard Van Why, who helps manage IT operations there. He described how the Lab's IT department set up its own lab to experiment with new software and tools, with a focus on things that make collaborations easier. Van Why said that once a lot of organizations find a stable configuration, they focus on maintaining that stability. Of all the places he's worked, JPL is the most dynamic; its IT group emphasizes the need to constantly improve, even when things work well enough already.

Of course, keeping them working well remains important. "The flight software team uses most of our services to make sure their services work," Van Why said.

Naveed Near-Ansari is the high performance lead at Caltech, and his responsibilities involve obtaining the hardware and software users need, then making sure they play nicely with each other. In Near-Ansari's case, the hardware is clusters that start at 500 cores and go up to 4,000 (there's also a couple of GPU-based systems at Caltech). "They are typically x86 commercial hardware, with the secret sauce added on—that's high-speed interconnects, provisioning systems, schedulers, and typically parallel file systems," he told Ars. "All of them are used under MPI, which allows each of the nodes to talk to each other for a larger problem."

The systems he supports perform all sorts of different functions. The Division of Geology and Planetary Sciences has one of the largest, used for climate and planetary simulations. Another cluster handles real-time simulations of earthquakes as they strike; it can get video out to the media for use within an hour. A Web lets users submit architectural designs, which are then subjected to a simulated earthquake. Still other clusters handle molecular dynamics and aeronautic simulations.

When asked what appeals to him about the work, Near-Ansari told Ars, "You get to do top-to-bottom work. You get to determine what the needs are, architect a design based on those needs, implement the design, and then run it. And then you build a new system." But, echoing a common theme, he added that the appeal of job is about more than just gear. "People I get to interact with on a daily basis are some of the smartest people you're going to find," he said.

Researchers helping researchers

Most of the jobs profiled so far support other people's research. But sometimes the researchers being supported themselves work to create new systems useful to still other researchers. That's the case for Ryan Baumann, a research associate at the University of Kentucky. He has a masters' degree in computer science, focused on image processing, and he's still developing code that manipulates objects and images in three dimensions to help digitize and process ancient texts.

Armed with a 40 megapixel camera, Baumann's team at the Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments takes images of documents across a range of wavelengths. "We'll just turn on the set of UV LEDs or the set of IR LEDs," Baumann said. "We'll shoot at 14 wavelengths starting with UV at 365nm and then we go up to the infrared at 940nm." Once that's done, the team shoots images with a laser to get information on the three-dimensional shape of the document, including folds, wrinkles, and the curve of the pages.

The Venetus A document, with its associated notes, is available online.

Homer Multitext Library

In addition to doing the imaging, Baumann writes the software that helps reconstruct all this information into a single, multispectral document image. When the process is complete, the results become the raw material for other scholars. "A lot of this [work] has been in collaboration with a group at Harvard called the Center for Hellenic Studies and the Homer Multitext Project there," Baumann said, "where they're trying to take these manuscripts and line them up and see what the variations are."

"Another one of the projects we've done is at Lichfield Cathedral in England for the St. Chad Gospels. It's an eighth century gospel manuscript, and they also had a 15th or 16th century Wycliff Bible, which is an early English translation of the Bible."

Baumann's team also has access to a lead room that houses a high-intensity micro-CT scanner to peer inside sealed containers. They've used the device to image scrolls in sealed containers that came from Herculaneum, a Roman town buried in volcanic eruptions. Unfortunately, that effort didn't produce any readable text, but it did show them how the scrolls were folded, which could help in the reconstruction of other materials.

Not content with all the imaging, Baumann also wants to make the results more accessible. He helps to develop Papyri.info, where ancient documents can be viewed along with detailed information on their history and translations. (The project is a front-end for XML files hosted on github.)

If the work sounds challenging, that's exactly why it appeals to Baumann. "The most interesting part is finding research questions that touch on both sides," he said. "Finding something that a humanities scholar is interested in that we can help them answer using some kind of digital approach that is also challenging enough on the digital side that it pushes computer science forward as well."